Old Zhiqing photos: Nostalgia and the "spirit" of the cultural revolution

China Review

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 97-123

  Davies, David J ^a  

^a HAMLINE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33645779541     PISSN: 16802012     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. In a general sense, the "educated youth" known as zhishi qingnian, or zhiqing, began to go to the countryside as early as the late 1950s. These early zhiqing volunteered or were sent to the countryside to aid rural development and education. The term zhiqing in contemporary usage, however, is commonly associated with the cohort of elementary and middle school youth who had been active participants in the first years of the Cultural Revolution and were sent to the countryside beginning in 1968. The zhiqing youth who went the countryside during the Cultural Revolution are often referred to in English as "sent-down youth" or "rusticated youth" a usage that emphasizes their urban origins. This obscures, however, the associations of the Chinese term, which emphasizes the different educational level of the students vis-à-vis the rural peasantry. The multiple meanings of the language used to narrate the past is one of the subjects of this essay, and for this reason I have chosen to use the Chinese term unitalicized throughout this essay.
2. Xue Yanwen and Zhang Xueshan (eds.), Zhiqing lao zhaopian (Zhiqing Old Photos), Vol. 1 (2 vols.; Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1998).
3. For example, Feng Jicai, Yibaigeren de shinian (One Hundred People's Ten Years) (Nanjing: Jiangsu Provincial Publishing House, 1997);
4. Ji Xianlin, Niupeng zhayi (Recollections from a Cowshed) (Beijing: Zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1998);
5. Xiao Ke, Li Rui and Gong Yuzhi, Wo qinliguo de zhengzhi yundong (Political Movements That I Have Personally Experienced) (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1998);
6. Xiao Xue (ed.), 1966-1976: A Record of Common Chinese People's Lives, Vol. 1, Wenge Bowuguan (Cultural Revolution Museum) (Beijing: Jingguan Jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996);
7. Xu Youyu 1966: Women nayidai de huiyi (1966: The Memories of Our Generation) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 1998);
8. Zhe Yongping, Nayi niandai zhong de women (We in That Time) (Hohhot: Yuanfang chubanshe, 1998).
9. Meng Fanhua, Zhongsheng kuanghuan: Dangdai Zhongguo de wenhua chongtu wenti (The Revelry of Gods: The Problem of Cultural Conflict in Contemporary China) (Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1997), p. 75.
10. Xiao et al. (Note 3), p. 2.
11. Feng Jicai's book Yibaigeren de shinian, translated into English as Ten Years of Madness, was one of the first books to directly address the topic of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, see Feng Jicai, Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991);
12. Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China's Cultural Revolution (Beijing: China Books & Periodicals, 1996)
13. and Feng (Note 3). I spoke with Feng one afternoon at his office in Tianjin.
14. The concern with nostalgia in the Chinese media and among mainstream Chinese commentators that coincided with the zhiqing activities of the late 1990s and the publication of a magazine like Zhiqing Old Photos are also reflected in academic literature, which has regularly remarked upon its appearance. In China, nostalgia for the colonial period of Shanghai, the "golden age" of the 1950s and the Mao period more generally have been observed in rural areas (see Liu Xin, In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-Reform Rural China [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000];
15. Kevin J. O'Brien and Li Anjiang, "Campaign Nostalgia in the Chinese Countryside," Asian Survey, Vol. 3 [May/June 1999], pp. 375-94)
16. and among the urban working-classes (see Ching Kwan Lee, "From the Specter of Mao to the Spirit of the Law: Labor Insurgency in China," Theory & Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2002), pp. 189-219).
17. The most well-known case was the "Mao craze (Maore)" that spanned the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s (see Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader [Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996]).
18. For academic discussions of nostalgia in the former Soviet Union, see the work of Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994);
19. "From the Toilet to the Museum: Memory and Metamorphosis of Soviet Trash," in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, edited by A. M. Barker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999);
20. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001),
21. as well as essays in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999). Examples in the American media were numerous from 1999 until 2001, at the tenth anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
22. Perry Link, "Reflections on Commonality in Human Memory of Disaster," paper presented at the conference on "Remembering and Forgetting: The Political and Social Aftermath of Intense Conflict in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe," 15-17 April 1999, at Lund, Sweden.
23. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press. 1995), pp. 19-20.
24. Ibid., p. 149.
25. The work of Michel de Certeau theorizes the value of narratives and their creation and reproduction by social actors in everyday life. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984).
26. In historiography, Haden White has examined the social construction of historical facts and their relationship to the narrative form. See White Hayden, "Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination," in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978);
27. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
28. Chen Yixin, "Lost in Revolution and Reform: The Socioeconomic Pains of China's Red Guards Generation, 1966-1996," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 8, No. 21 (1999), pp. 219-39.
29. In English, Bernstein presents the most comprehensive examination directly focused on the Cultural Revolution campaign. See Thomas Bernstein, Up To the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).
30. More recently Pan has reexamined the goals of rural rustication in the PRC. See Yihong Pan, "An Examination of the Goals of the Rustication Program in the People's Republic of China," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 11, No. 31 (2002), pp. 361-79.
31. Much literature which deals with the zhiqing places them in the larger context of their roles as radical students and Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (c.f. Anita Chen [sic], "Dispelling Misconceptions about the Red Guard Movement: The Necessity to Re-examine Cultural Revolution Factionalism and Periodization," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1992), pp. 61-85;
32. Stanley Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982);
33. Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
34. The majority of Cultural Revolution memoir literature published after the Cultural Revolution avoids the zhiqing experience, the exception being Rae Yang's autobiography. See Rae Yang, Spider Eaters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
35. In Chinese authorized histories of the Cultural Revolution are few, the most notable being by Jin Chunming, "Wenhua dageming" jianshi (A Concise History of the "Cultural Revolution") (Beijing: Central Party History Publishing House, 1999).
36. Specifically on the topic of zhiqing, see Liu Xiaomeng, Ding Yizhuang, Shi Weimin, and He Gang (eds.), Zhongguo zhiqing shidian (A Compendium of China Zhiqing Events) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1995). The vast majority of published writing, however, remains in the genre of memoir literature and fiction, as discussed by Guobin Yang in this volume.
37. At the beginning of our meeting, Xue offered me copies of three new books he had published on the zhiqing and a copy of a second volume of Zhiqing Old Photos that was released a few months later. See Xue Yanwen (ed.), 1968-1998: Zhiqing lao zhaopian (1968-1998: Zhiqing Old Photos), Vol. 2 (2 vols.; Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1998).
38. Beginning in the mid-1990s, collections of "old photographs," mostly of pre-revolutionary or dynastic China, were extremely popular. Most of these contained images of urban spaces, old buildings, or temples. One of the earliest and most popular collections was a multi-volume set entitled Old Homes (Lao fangzi), which was published in Nanjing. These collections were generally considered to be art, no doubt because of the huge number of glossy photographs they contained and their high prices. In the late 1990s, books in the popular genre focused on colonial Shanghai and Beijing's old alleyways (hutongs). Krebs provides a useful annotated list of a number of "old" publications he located in 1999-2000. See Edward S. Krebs, "Old in the Newest New China: Publications on Private Memories as Sources of Individual Views of History," paper presented at the conference on "Modern Chinese Historiography and Historical Thinking," 23-27 May 2001, at the University of Heidelberg.
39. See edited collections by Jacob J. Climo and Maria Cattell and John R. Gillis exploring the history of commemorations and monuments and their relationship to memory and identity. See Jacob J. Climo and Maria Cattell, Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Gillis, 2002);
40. John R. Grills, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
41. The magazine had a publication run of 300,000 copies, quite large by Chinese standards and especially when compared to other publications dealing with the Cultural Revolution. Given China's large population, first printings of books regularly run very large. Books that deal with the Cultural Revolution or zhiqing generally average about 10,000 copies a printing. By comparison, the 1996 state-sanctioned publication, Wenhua dageming jianshi (Note 13) ran to 50,000 copies. A 1997 republication of Feng Jicai's famous book of Cultural Revolution reportage, Yibaigeren de shinian (Note 3) had a run of only 10,300 copies.
42. Xue (Note 2), p. 24.
43. Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art," Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967).
44. Xue (Note 2), pp. 48-49.
45. Ibid., p. 35.
46. Xue (Note 2), pp. 34-35.
47. The issue of "regret" (hui) for youthful experiences during the Cultural Revolution was one that was visibly debated in the mid- to late 1990s. Rae Yang has suggested that the group which has "no regrets" is comprised largely of the zhiqing that have become successful during reform. See Rae Yang, "Two Kinds of Contested Memories in Contemporary China," paper presented at the conference on "Memory and Media in and of Contemporary China," 2-4 March 2001, at the University of California Berkeley. Among former zhiqing who have not become successful, Yang noted an extreme reluctance to talk about their experiences. Yang's observations seem to be consistent with many of the comments that are made in the last half of this paper by the relatively "successful" Li Youlang and the relatively "unsuccessful" Zhang Xianning and her husband.
48. Liu (Note 7), p. 6.
49. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (London: Yale University Press, 1990).
50. Caroline Humphrey, "Remembering an 'Enemy': The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia," in Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism, edited by R. Watson (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 21-44.
51. Ibid, p. 23.
52. Mobo C. F. Gao, "Manufacturing of Truth and Culture of the Elite," Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1999), pp. 309-27.
53. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 155-65.